There was a lot of talk at SALT Conference 2021 about Solana Labs, the supersonic racer of layer-one blockchain networks. Not surprisingly, much of that conversation centered on speed — or, in network parlance, transactions per second (TPS). If blockchain technology is ever to achieve mass adoption — 1 billion users, say — then it has to get faster, said Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of crypto exchange platform FTX, in a Monday morning panel session, adding, “You can’t have 1 billion people using a chain that has 10 transactions per second. It just doesn’t work.” To put things in context: Credit …

More than 200 smart contracts have been listed on the Cardano blockchain explorer following the Alonzo upgrade on Monday — but there’s a catch. As of now, the 200 smart contracts listed are in timelock and cannot be used by developers until they’re released. The Vercel App currently puts the number of smart contracts readying to be launched at more than 2,200. Smart contracts have been a long-anticipated feature on Cardano since its launch in 2017, and the functionality was finally enabled with the recent Alonzo hard fork. Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and IOHK, said on Friday that the …

As the growing world of decentralized finance (DeFi) continues to challenge traditional finance, a cross-chain ecosystem wants to reduce the barriers to entry for the average retail investor. Synapse Network describes itself as a 360-degree solution that provides the decentralized world with an investment technology ecosystem. According to Synapse, there are a number of problems that plague the early adopters of DeFi and blockchain today. One of them is startups that lack the expertise to navigate the complexity of launching their projects in the space. Meanwhile, potential users cannot always connect directly with the project for private and public rounds. …

In April of this year, an anonymous buyer purchased a copy of Action Comics #1 for $3,250,000 USD — the highest figure on record for a vintage comic book. Published in 1938 and featuring the first-ever appearance of Superman, the comic is one of the last known copies in existence. Prior to the auction, it was graded by the Certified Guaranty Company, or CGC, using a 10-point system, where it received a near-perfect score. Any legitimate copy of Action Comics #1 would have been worth a decent sum of money, but this particular book out-sold all others because its physical …

The minimum cost to buy a CryptoPunks nonfungible token (NFT) from secondary marketplaces dropped below 80 Ether (ETH) on Sept. 14. Larva Labs reported that the so-called "CryptoPunk 1417," a pixelated avatar of one of 3840 women created by digital artists Matt Hall and John Watkinson, is listed for sale at 79.99 ETH (almost $266,168). The floor price of CryptoPunks fell below 80 ETH. pic.twitter.com/aD3Cwbl0IK — Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) September 14, 2021 A quick look into the history of transactions involving #1417 showed that its owner sold it for as low as 0.9 ETH (~$159) in January 2020. The new …

And how to make the development of dApps faster? The issue can be solved by a new standard based on WebAssembly (Wasm) that addresses this bottleneck in rolling out decentralized apps (dApps). But Wasm isn’t recognized by Ethereum. As mentioned, Wasm is faster than JavaScript development, and the new method is supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is already used in next-generation public blockchains such as Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana and Oasis as the virtual machine architecture to interact with their dApps. In addition, Ethereum-flavored Wasm, better known as Ewasm, is a standard that is already on the …

The price of Cardano (ADA) fell on Monday in line with the other top cryptocurrencies despite the completion of its hard fork upgrade dubbed “Alonzo,” which introduced smart contract functionality. The ADA/USD exchange rate dropped 10.67% to reach its intraday low of $2.30, partly due to profit-taking sentiment among traders following the pair’s 1,200%-plus price rally this year. Additionally, the intraday sell-off also surfaced in the period of an overall crypto market decline, with top tokens Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) falling 4% and 6.97%, respectively. Cardano’s drop appeared when its core foundation rolled out a long-awaited smart contracts feature …

Cardano has announced the completion of its Alonzo hard fork, ushering in its long-awaited smart contract functionality. On Monday, IOHK tweeted that the upgrade had been completed successfully at epoch 290, facilitating the creation and execution of smart contracts on the public blockchain for the first time. Despite celebrating the milestone, Cardano notes that it is still in the “early days for the project,” asserting that now is when “the mission truly begins” in a blog post published on the same day: “This is where the mission truly begins as we – the whole community – start delivering on the …

Solana (SOL) started Friday at a new record high as investors continued to bet positively on its success in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFT) sector. The SOL/USD exchange rate reached $146.28 for the first time in history, following a 35% month-to-date rally. The huge upside move lifted the pair’s returns for the year above 7,500%, taking Solana’s market capitalization over $41 billion to make it the seventh-most valuable project in the cryptocurrency space. Solana’s run-up to record highs also brought overvaluation risks in focus, with a classic momentum indicator, the relative strength index (RSI), returning an overbought …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) project Cream Finance will bring its lending and borrowing services to Moonbeam, a smart contract platform on Polkadot. In a Thursday announcement, Moonbeam said Cream Finance would be integrating with its ecosystem, starting with a parachain on Kusama, Moonriver and then on Polkadot. Kusama and Polkadot users will be able to use Cream’s services to deposit digital assets as collateral or lend them out. “Lending and borrowing protocols lie at the heart of a productive DeFi ecosystem,” said Moonbeam founder Derek Yoo. “The integration not only provides a critical capability to the growing DeFi ecosystem on Moonbeam, …

Ethereum’s native asset, Ether (ETH), has extended its rally on Wednesday to log multi-month highs against Bitcoin (BTC) and the United States dollar. The ETH/BTC exchange rate rose 3.13% to hit 0.07475 for the first time since June 9. Meanwhile, bids for ETH/USD climbed 3.4% to $3,546, the highest since May 18, showcasing a renewed upside sentiment in the second-largest cryptocurrency market after it consolidated sideways for more than three weeks. Ether’s price jump appeared despite a wobbling price behavior across the cryptocurrency market. For instance, Bitcoin prices remained stuck around $47,000 while eyeing a clear breakout move above their …

Layer-one smart contract platforms increased their market share throughout August after the Ethereum network London hard fork did little to solve the major issues of high transaction fees and network congestion. One top 10 protocol that has been gaining momentum but whose native coin, DOT, has yet to experience a significant price breakout to new highs like some of its competitors is Polkadot, a multichain protocol focused on facilitating the creation of cross-chain bridges between separate blockchain networks. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that after bottoming out at $10.36 on July 20, the price of DOT increased …